El fill

Ferran Utzet is bringing the 2023 Nobel prizewinning Norwegian author Jon Fosse to the stage. It is a play about family, tense, beautiful and subtle, by one of the main masters on contemporary northern European drama, which will close the season at the Espai Lliure.

An elderly couple, a man and a woman, are looking out the window. They are awaiting the arrival of their son, who has been away for a long time. There are fewer and fewer people in this little town. The young people are leaving it. Everyone is leaving it. Hardly anyone is left. When their son finally arrives, things will not be the way they had imagined it.

"El fill is a play by the Norwegian author and Nobel Prize-winning writer Jon Fosse that depicts the impact on an older couple of the return home of their only child after a long absence. The couple lives in a cold and isolated area, almost unpopulated, where loneliness is deep and persistent. Still, the reunion with the son does not bring them any warmth or joy.
In a kind of dark reverse of the parable of the prodigal son, the only thing that triggers this unexpected visit is an unbearable tension. Communication between parents and son is almost non-existent and it is further disturbed by the presence of the only neighbor, a lonely, strange and alcoholic man who, with his insinuations, makes the already fragile trust between the characters wobble.
Jon Fosse builds a moral fable, a terrible moving poem that explores the emptiness, the silence and the difficulty of communicating. Because the characters in El fill try to talk, but they can’t. And as Albert Camus said, almost all the evils of humanity come from not speaking clearly."
_Ferran Utzet